The influence of an extended Atlantic hurricane season on inland flooding potential in the southeastern United States

Stone, Monica H.; Cohen, Sagy

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-17-439-2017

Articles | Volume 17, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-17-439-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

Risk and uncertainty estimation in natural hazards

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-17-439-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 3

Research article

|

21 Mar 2017

Research article |

| 21 Mar 2017

The influence of an extended Atlantic hurricane season on inland flooding potential in the southeastern United States

Monica H. Stone and Sagy Cohen

Data sets

Atlantic hurricane database C. Landsea, J. Franklin, and J. Beven http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/

Model code and software

River Watch, Version 3 G. R. Brakenridge, T. De Groeve, A. Kettner, S. Cohen, and S. V. Nghiem http://floodobservatory.colorado.edu/DischargeAccess.html

Short summary

This research was conducted in order to determine what effect a longer hurricane season is likely to have on flooding risk in the southeastern United States. We found that an extension of the hurricane season to May–December (just 2 months longer) increased the number of days that would be at risk to flooding were the average tropical cyclone to occur by 28–180 %. This is signifiant, as global climate change is likely to increase sea surface temperatures and extend the hurricane season.